OLX Shuts Down Physical Offices in Nigeria and Kenya

February 7, 2018February 7, 2018 by Lynn Wandia

OLX, one of Africa’s leading e-commerce platforms, is shutting its Kenya and Nigeria outlets. According to a source at the firm, the staff in those countries were formally informed of the decision on February 6.

Staff were reportedly notified of their termination beginning in March. It is not clear the number of workers who have been affected by the decision.

OLX has been struggling to make its businesses in Kenya and Nigeria viable since it entered markets in 2012.

In Kenya, many people use the platform to buy goods, sell livestock among others.

On his part, Sjoerd Nikkelen, CEO of OLX in Asia, Middle East and Africa made the statement below, available to TechPoint,;

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“We made a difficult but important decision in Nigeria to consolidate our operations between some of our offices internationally.”

“Our marketplace will continue to operate here — uninterrupted — as it has since 2010, and we remain committed to the many people here who use our platform to buy and sell every month. We continue to be focused on constantly innovating to make sure that OLX remains the top classifieds platform in the country.”

“Of course, we are committed to helping our affected colleagues during this transition and have already offered them meaningful financial and other support. As we’ve expressed to them directly, we are extremely grateful for their many significant contributions to OLX’s success.”

According to the statement, only physical spaces of the company would be affected, which translates that the online platform would still be up and running adequately.
Clear reasons were not given for this closure but we think that the decision was made as a result of the high cost of maintenance of physical offices, which would be telling very badly on the amount of revenue generated.

The online marketplace which is headquartered in Amsterdam, and owned by South African media and technology group, Naspers, while also operating in 45 countries might be trying hard to cut costs in the African market, which led to the closure.